His name is Tweek, and he is a favorite character
of mine from
South Park.
This coffee guzzling fourth grader has uncontrollable twitches,
hallucinations of underwear gnomes, and spontaneous verbal exclamations
like "Aaaack!" and "Oh no!".

Sometimes my two computers have uncontrollable
twitches, and they also choke up odd exclamations. It's not their
fault, they are thirteen years old, and I use them heavily.
Instead of buying a new machine, I opted for tweaking them. That
way I can put off the big purchase for a while.

These tweaks are to the operating system.
That is to say, I've done no hardware upgrades, or over clocking of any
sort. I'm a firm believer that over clocking hastens the demise of
your computer.

Format your hard drive and reinstall all your
programs. It may sound extreme, but the performance gained
is well worth it. Through out your computers life, you've
installed programs, uninstalled programs, and quite possible installed
upgrades. Each time you did this, the Registry grew in size, and a
plethora of dynamic link libraries were sprinkled about your system.
Even after uninstalling files, most of them stay behind. What you
have is the equivalent to barnacles on a ship. The best way
to fix it, is to put your machine in dry dock, and format.

If you are like most people you don't use most
of the programs installed. By not reinstalling those programs you
will save hard drive space.

System Tweaks

1.) Empty the Start Up folder - A big problem with system
performance is there are usually a lot of programs that run at start up.
I detest these programs. They are leeches, that sit around sucking
the computer of precious memory and CPU time. At most, only two
programs should be loaded in memory. The first would be a virus
program, and the second is a firewall like ZoneAlarm. I have
neither, but that's a person choice of mine. (I use a hardware
firewall, and I never open e-mail attachments) If you have a lot
of icons in your system tray, that's the lower right hand corner next to
the clock, you should disable those that you absolutely don't need.
You should be able to right click them, and set their properties to not
launch them at start up. Every program is different, so you'll
have to examine the options provided.

2.) Lose the Themes - are the bloated, nasty things that slow XP
down, and drain system of valuable resources.

4.) Remote Assistance Security Hole - Remote Assistance is a
tool that allows someone else to come in and remote control your
computer over the Internet or network. This is ENABLED BY DEFAULT.
Unless you need this, disable it as your box is wide open.

6.) TweakXP - There are many little tweaks that your box can use
to make it faster.

a. Download TweakXP.
b. Install TweakXP and run it.
c. Select CACHE OPTIMIZATION on the left.
d. If you have 512MB of RAM or more, select ENABLE CORE SYSTEM
PERFORMANCE. This will make XP NOTICABLY faster, as your OS will no
longer page to the HD anymore.
e. Select a Cache setting that matches your memory configuration.
f. Select HARDWARE TWEAKS from the list on the left.
g. Make selections and tweak your video card and your CPU based on what
you have.
h. Close TweakXP - you're done! TweakXP doesn't need to remain on your
system anymore to get the benefits. Uninstall if you like.

7.) Disable WebPopUps - Seems that people are using WebPopUp
Messenger to send spam to unsuspecting Windows users.

8.) Ad Blocking - Instead of using ad blocking programs I
prefer to use make changes to the HOST file on my machine, which will
block many ad severs. If you want to reverse the process later, be
sure to first rename the HOST file before overwriting it with this new
one. This will probably block non ad images, as many sites
are now placing all their images on these ad servers to get you to view
the ads. Currently, if I go to the MSNBC news site, I'm unable to
see any of the graphics, even their navigational buttons. For me
it's a price I'm willing to pay, you may not want this.

a. Download the zip file ->
HOSTS
b. Save it to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\ (this will overwrite what
is there)
c. Load your browser - almost all the ads will be GONE from your pages. If
you find another ad server you want blocked, load
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts into Notepad or other PURE text
editor and add it in the same manner the others are.